Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Forget Disney World. I'm going to Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts this summer. I'm hauling my kids off to see that New England re-creation of the 1627 Pilgrim settlement. Not to mention the famous rock and a replica of the Mayflower.
The reason: Nathaniel Philbrick's new book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. The author of the National Book Award winner In the Heart of the Sea transforms a familiar tale of turkeys and Thanksgiving into a thoughtful story about political and cultural accommodation between alien cultures. And the tragedy that ensues when rigidity replaces flexibility.
It's not that Philbrick has uncovered a cache of 17th-century documents. Rather, it is Philbrick's subtle and detailed portrayal of not just the Pilgrims but also of the various tribes and sachems (leaders) that makes Mayflower so compelling.
Most Americans have a vague memory from elementary school pageants of an Indian greeting the frightened Pilgrims. Philbrick's history makes the reader understand the intricate inter-tribal forces that motivated Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem, to dispatch an English-speaking ally, Samoset, to stride into the struggling settlement proclaiming, "Welcome, Englishmen!"
Massasoit's tribe had shrunk from 12,000 to a few hundred because of disease, probably bubonic plague. The Indian leader was eager to form an alliance for self-preservation.
The peace Massasoit and the Pilgrims forged lasted far longer than the famous 1621 Thanksgiving feast. For 55 years, Massasoit's tribe collaborated with the Pilgrims.
One reason was the unusual nature of the Pilgrims. Austere, rigid, deeply religious, they were not motivated by greed or racial hate. Philbrick marvelously conveys how these men of peace were dazzled by the physical splendor of tall, muscular warriors like Samoset.
Philbrick makes it clear that the Indians were not a monolithic mass of doomed noble savages naively welcoming their future enemy. Instead, he brings alive historical figures like the clever Squanto. Having been held captive by European sailors, he spoke English and knew London. He provided invaluable help to the Pilgrims, in part because he had political ambitions.
The genuine bonds that developed between Massasoit's tribe and the Pilgrims were frayed, then broken, by distrust, a hunger for land among the Pilgrims' offspring, and tribal tensions. Philbrick describes the savagery of King Philip's War that decimated New England beginning in 1675.
Philbrick makes the case that war was not inevitable. "As long as both sides recognized that they needed each other, there was peace. The next generation, however, came to see things differently."
And that was the tragedy.
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
By Nathaniel Philbrick
Viking, 462 pp., $29.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
